


Sing Beware

by TeratoCybernetics



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, angsty as fuck, but people, my love affair with italics continues, not good people, villains are people too, what quadrant is this?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 23:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/pseuds/TeratoCybernetics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sometimes, that quiet is too much, and there is a whisper in the silence that is left inside your skull, accusing, questioning. Most often, it sounds like him...</p><p>...But sometimes that whisper sounds like you did, once. Smaller, far younger, and as innocent as you are no longer certain you have ever actually been. And there is no cruelty or pleasure invented that can shut this voice out. It wonders what happened to you, amazed and devastated at once by all the things you have done. It asks uncomfortable questions, queries you’d have anyone else culled for even daring to think, had you that particular sense. <i>Why are you like this? Why do you do these things? What happened?</i>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing Beware

**Author's Note:**

> _I steal a piece of your diary.  
>  I don't think that looks like me.  
> Am I so cold, now that I'm older?  
> I tell you stories,  
> That doesn't mean you know me._  
> -[Belly, 'The Bees'](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZao8Esp7g8) (at YouTube)

A hush tends to follow you wherever you go in your hiveship, your pride, your love, and sometimes, it is a sign of your strength, of just how far you have come over countless sweeps. That all the warring and the death that inevitably follows in your wake has been worth it. Not as if you need anything to tell you that, but marking the path that has gone is useful so you don’t end up living in circles. Sometimes the wake of silence as you pace the near-endless hallways, watching as all your lessers scramble to stay both useful and out of your notice is a satisfying thing, as much so as warm brandied tea or fucking or the deceptively gentle tide of spilling blood.

Sometimes, that quiet is too much, and there is a whisper in the silence that is left inside your skull, accusing, questioning. Most often, it sounds like _him_. You have ridden this ship for thousands of sweeps, watched so many crews live and age and then die, fleeting as hour-flies. It is less than a thought for you take the reins in the helmsblock from whoever is on flight and navigation duty that evening. You don’t even have to think about how the controls of the Condescension are laid out anymore, it’s all muscle memory, so you twist _this_ and drive the throttle up until it hums and the framework shakes. Your pity, your hate, you’re not sure what he is to you anymore, but when you set the pace this high, he _burns_ , screaming, drowning out that accusing voice in psychic fire and pain as he is driven to try and fulfill your demands and always, he fails. Every time, you watch him die and you drag him back from that howling brink, just so that you both know, whatever he is, whatever happens, he is still yours.

But sometimes that whisper sounds like you did, once. Smaller, far younger, and as innocent as you are no longer certain you have ever actually been. And there is no cruelty or pleasure invented that can shut this voice out. It wonders what happened to you, amazed and devastated at once by all the things you have done. It asks uncomfortable questions, queries you’d have anyone else culled for even daring to think, had you that particular sense. Why are you like this? Why do you do these things? What _happened_?

Because you are nothing if not patient, as glaciers and geology, you wait that small, discomfiting voice out until much of the crew is gone to sleep, until there’s only the late-day skeleton crew, and nothing to be done that you’d be stupid to postpone or interrupt. Then you send these last few away from the helmsblock as well, locking the doors behind them. There is only ever one who can override this particular lock at any given time, and for whoever holds it to bother you here, it had better be a saltfucked flaming wreckage of an emergency.

Every time you resurrect him, or simply extend his life, he is made new again, never more or less than a dozen or so sweeps evident in his face, long-boned and narrow, sharp and near-feral and achingly clever. The only clue that he is the same yellowblood you snapped up from that rebellion, and not a descendant you’ve replaced him with at some point, rests in his eyes, in a certain pull to his mouth. What coils in the parts of his thinkpan that aren’t programming is numbingly black for you, so very far beyond any pretense at romance or anything even remotely sane. You don’t have to have psionics of your own to know this, you touch it every single time you pour life back into him. It’s razor-edged and colder than the deepest waters and there is no end you know of to it.

You watch him pretending not to be aware of you, but this ship is wired into him, and he into it. You supervised the installation yourself, and you know how extensively and intimately they are entwined. His sensorium surrounds you and all the thousands on this vessel. If there is anything on board that he does not pick up on, it is by his own design, and more important, he has the ability to record anything that happens on this vessel.

That small voice wants you to never have done this to him, or any of the things you have done to anyone. It wants to return to when it was just you, and the ocean, and your guardian, before politics and spaceships, dissolution nanos, railguns and orbital strikes. Before sunrise rooms and evisceration courts and truth-parasites. Before the sweeps, and then the centuries, had accreted around you and hardened, thus.

After some time spent sitting crosslegged on a control panel, watching the still form of your Helmsman, you start telling him stories, and when you do, that voice goes still. Sometimes you bring a bottle of honey brandy, and you pour glass after crystalline glass, sip on it for the most difficult parts, but you never once hold back, because that seems to be the most important part of this. You reach back, and back even more, and you tell him _everything_. Terrible things, silly _, small_ things, things that you never want to forget, things that should not ever be dulled with time.

The first few times you locked yourself in with him, he cursed you, spat, screamed at you, and you waited until he could not, anymore, to begin, and you started all of this with the story of how you dissected the Signless’ rebellion. He thought you were gloating until the next time, when the subject changed to nothing that had anything to do with them. He probably thought it was some kind of mindgame, then. You then had all of this and every single time since, routed to and secreted away on your own personal drives, in your most private quarters, wrapped in layer upon layer of encryption. It wouldn’t give anyone enough leverage to depose you if it got out, not this far along, but even the appearance of vulnerability would make your life irritating for quite some time. 

You tell him of when you still had grublegs, of how not long after losing those, you once got lost and tried to ride a jellybeast home and of the terrible stings you earned in even worse places for your efforts. Of the first time you took power, a coup which lasted for perigees, an abbatoir over moon-cycles, and there wasn’t a morning of that you did not have blood to wash off before sleeping, sometimes blood that would not be scrubbed away, sinking instead into the whorls of your thinkpan, into your very being. How you found out landtrolls couldn’t breathe underwater, like you do. Your first matesprit, your first fumbling attempt at kismessitude, your first kill. How you learned you could steal and extend life. The kinds of things you liked when you were a more carefree thing, like your shell collection and paintings. The songs you sang to the sea creatures, to your Horrormom. You list off the most effective ways to torture someone without actually damaging them too much, your favourite foods and quadrantmates, the most interesting star systems you have seen and why you want to go back to them. You have recorded, in light and sound and magnetic signature, all of the reasons you have placed yourself above, why you have been cruel, why there is no other way for things to be, and so much more.

You do not apologise. There is no value to shame that you have ever found that was not in the service of manipulating others. You seek no confession; what’s passed has passed, and this trajectory cannot change. But that tiny, gentle, fearful voice, something that may or may not have ever been yours, wants both you and him to know all of it, to remember it clearly and unflinchingly. It wants honesty, and it wants a record to keep you that way, at least to yourself.

He can still speak, though he rarely does, anymore. Most often now, he is silent, sleeping through this, recording unconsciously. Sometimes he watches like a caged slitherbeast, unblinking and expressionless, except for that black fucking spark in him, like a hole punched through to the Furthest Ring, a magnesium flare in negative. There are times where he tries to give in and join you, fooling himself into conversing like anyone would, grasping at sanity because you are likely the only one to talk to him like he is even half of a troll, anymore, but those periods are brief and after too long, guilt finds him again.

During one of these spans, he asked why you were telling him all of this, and why you saved it all, and it took sweeps for you to answer. His question itched and rang in the back of your pan, surfacing occasionally to bring you many sleepless days over that time. You knew the rudiments of the impulse, but not the root. Why the demand for honesty from yourself? No one else demands a thing from you; they do not dare, and while it would not be easy to shut this off, to drown your voices some other way, you could ignore them, having cut yourself off from a great many other things over your lifetime. Eventually, your answer came like snowfall, soft and quiet and absolute.

You waited until dead-hour once more, chased off the crew, closed and locked the doors. Watched him as he watched you fold your legs beneath you, as you slid your hands into the sleeves of your robes. He was and is ever beautiful, still so impossibly fucking proud, an eidolon, a figurehead, and some might consider this a kind of worship, your own peculiar devotional to a hostile god you’ve chained to yourself. You weren’t sure how long you waited before speaking.

“You asked why I do this, once.”

“I remember this.” His voice came through the speakers at first, his warm, desert-dry tenor reproduced perfectly by the computers, then rasping and disused from his own mouth. “I remember everything, thanks to you.”

“I don’t do this for your pity." His response was an expression you still haven’t parsed. Spite, curiosity, disbelief, a weird kind of hope, all of this and more. “You hate me, and if anyone ever had reason, it’s you. My entire species is black for me, one way or another, whether they know it consciously or not, and I don’t blame them, either. I do not ask for redemption, redemption is how fools handle guilt, and I do not regret. Regret is for someone who can afford weakness. What I want is for them to hate me for the monster I actually am, not the bogeyman they have made of me.” You stood again,  boots sounding hard on the floor as you made your way back over to the door. Hand splayed over the lockcode keys. you had paused before opening it. “All I want from history, if there is any 'after’ to be had, is the same honesty I am giving it, with this."

He did not answer as you left, except by screwing his jeweltoned eyes shut and dropping into silent mode.


End file.
